Helen Blackburn was born on 25 May 1842 at Knightstown, Valentia Island, Co. Kerry, Ireland. She was a keen watercolour painter but had to give it up in her early twenties due to continued eyesight problems. She was a great supporter of women's suffrage and employment and worked for a number of suffrage societies: she was secretary of the London-based Central Committee of the National Society for Women's Suffrage (1874-80); secretary of the Bristol and West of England Society for Women's Suffrage (1880-95); assistant secretary of the reorganised Central Committee (1888-95); and honorary secretary of the Central and East of England Society for Women's Suffrage from 1897. She received a donation of £1000 which funded her suffrage work in south and west Wales and the west country and a series of lecture tours. In Bristol she became actively involved with the National Union of Working Women, representing it as a suffrage advocate at the TUC in 1881; she also promoted the work of the newly founded West Bristol Women's Liberal Association.
Helen Blackburn was also an accomplished writer and historian, and her publication 'Women's suffrage: a record of the women's suffrage movement in the British Isles, with biographical sketches of Miss Becker' (1902) is a comprehensive history of the Victorian suffrage campaign and of what came before it. She was also editor (1880-90) and joint editor (1890-95) of the Englishwoman’s Review, a feminist journal founded and supported by Jessie Boucherett [dates for these editorships have been taken from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography - http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/31905 ].
She firmly believed that working women should not be beholden to any additional legislation. In order to propagate these views, she and Jessie Boucherett wrote 'The Condition of Working Women and the Factory Acts' (1896); and with Nora Vynne she wrote 'Women under the Factory Act' (1903) and helped to found the Freedom of Labour Defence Society in 1899 (whose archive is also held by Girton College Archive).
Helen Blackburn died on 11 January 1903. A loan fund for training young women was established in her memory in 1905: this was administered by the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women (later the Society for Promoting the Training of Women and known, as at 2023, as Futures for Women. The SPTW archive is also held by Girton College Archive).